Murder
on the Rabbit Proof FenceHesperian
Press, Western Australia, 1993

The
picture on the cover of the book shows the Rabbit Proof Fence at the 183 Mile
Peg

About
the Book

In
the late 1980s I toyed
with the idea of producing a glossy coffee-table photography book full of images
taken along Western Australia's famous Rabbit Proof fence. The Number 1 fence
stretched from the north coast to the south coast, passing a few miles to the
east of Merridin on Great Eastern Highway, and dividing the state into two halves.

In
the end the project lapsed - an Alfa Romeo sports car is not the ideal vehicle
for such an outback trek - but not before I'd done a lot of research and came
up against the strange story of Arthur W Upfield and Snowy Rowles.

In
1929 Arthur Upfield, English-born but in Australia from 1910 (interrupted by
war service at Gallipoli) was an itinerant bush worker who was also a published
novelist, and he got work on the Rabbit Proof Fence as a boundary rider. While
based at the Govermnent Camel Station on the fence at Dromedary Hills, patrolling
more than 100 miles of fence, he began to concoct a plot for his detective,
half-aboriginal policeman Napoleon Bonaparte. The idea was to come up with a
method of completely disposing of a corpse, using only ordinary materials available
on any outback sheep station, so that nothing at all remained. This was to be
the great challenge for his detective: prove murder without a body.

He
solved the disposal problem with the amused assistance of fellow boundary riders.
The project was often talked about over campfires, where the boundary riders
were joined by other itinerant bush workers. One such was Snowy Rowles, who
worked on nearby Narndee Station.

By
the time the book, The Sands of Windee, appeared in 1931 Snowy
Rowles had tried Upfield's disposal method after killing three bush workers.
He wasn't as good at it as Upfield's villain, but like that villain Rowles was
eventually caught, tried, and executed. Upfield was a witness at the trial,
to his great distress.

Instead
of a general fence project, my book evolved into a detailed True Crime book
on the Rowles Case called Murder on the Rabbit Proof Fence, and
was published by Australiana and Western Australiana specialist Hesperian
Press in Perth. It is still in print, available from a number of outlets
in Perth, and also in Mt Magnet and Dalwallinu. Not to mention the Stockman
Hall of Fame at Longreach, Qld.

As
part of my research I visited the location of the murders, the old Camel Station,
and other locations along the Fence, and took a number of photos. I also chased
up historic news photos of the case, and drew a map of the locality as it was
in 1930, as illustrations for the book.

Subsequent
developments

Just
before Christmas 2005 I received a telephone call from NZ, from the grand-daughter
of one of Snowy Rowles' victims, "Louis Carron" (John Leslie Brown).
Her father Desmond, Carron's son, and his sister Fay (always
known as Molly in later year), were raised in Salvation Army homes, and didn't
see each other again until they were 15. She told me that Carron's widow Minnie
died recently at the age of 94. She was always a very strange and difficult
woman. Since
then I have been contacted by another grandchild of "Louis Carron",
one of Molly's children, who has read the book and at long last knows just what
happened to the grandfather who mysteriously disappeared so many years ago.

I
have also been contacted by the ABC TV programme "Can You Help", relaying
an enquiry from Marilyn Allen, the grand-daughter of South Australian victim
George Lloyd. I was able to help by giving details of where Lloyd died, and
also provide a high-res scan of the only known photo of Lloyd.

Finally,
there is reputedly an ABC TV documentary or docu-drama in the works, produced
by a Mr Bogle, a TV producer who is the grandson of the Bogles who owned Narndee
Station at the time. This is likely to be shown some time in 2008.